Can Welfare Reform Reduce Pregnancy Rates?

Ramon G. McLeod, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, March 8, 1998

There is a kind of "anti-baby" contest buried in the details of the welfare reform bill. The five states that are most successful in reducing the number of out-of-wedlock births, without raising abortion rates, will divvy up $100 million extra from the federal government.

It will be five years before we know who the winners are, but the "contest" itself speaks volumes about one of the key -- although little discussed -- goals of the 1996 welfare law: reducing the birth rates of the poor, unmarried mothers who are the heaviest users of public assistance.

"No one has talked much about this, but there is no question that Congress wanted to cause cultural changes with this law, and one of those changes was to try and cut out-of-wedlock births," said Shelly Lundberg, an economist at the University of Washington who has studied the effect of welfare cuts on fertility.

But will the realities of welfare time limits, which call for automatic benefit cutoffs after 60 months, discourage poor women from having children? Will the requirement that mothers go to work after two years on the system persuade them that smaller families make more economic sense?

The research into these questions is frustratingly thin, but what does exist indicates that the new law may affect the birth decisions of women who have already started families, but will probably do little to discourage unwed teenagers from having their first baby.

For example, a highly regarded 1995 study by Lundberg on adolescent premarital childbearing found that reducing welfare benefits had almost no effect on decisions by black teenagers to have a child out of wedlock.

"What we found was that the greater the person's prospects in life, the less likely she would get pregnant and carry the baby to term," she said. "But when you have no access to the labor market, no real chance of becoming productive, what you have left is bearing a child which gives you personal satisfaction and social admiration. Cutting welfare benefits under these conditions has virtually no impact."

Jane Mauldon
, a
University of California at Berkeley
economist, said that middle-class people may not be able to fathom the cultural differences that lead to the seemingly illogical decision to have a baby when one is poor, young and single.

"In a very real way, getting pregnant may be a response to the lack of opportunity for themselves and their peer group," she said.

"These young women have few prospects. They aren't going to college. They aren't going anywhere. So parenting becomes a transition to adulthood that they might not get from any other means."

But poor women who have begun a family react differently to economic realities from teenagers going through their first pregnancy, said Laura Argys, a University of Colorado economist. "There is a very different perception of what it means to have a child when you've already had one," she said.

Argys said that her research shows that raising and lowering welfare benefits does influence birth decisions among women who have already had a baby.

Before the law took effect in 1993, a single mother of two who had a third child could expect a $64 increase in her welfare and food stamp payments. Now, she collects only an extra $19 in food stamps -- in effect a $45 cut in benefits.

The Argys study found that after the law was passed, fertility among women on welfare decreased between 14 and 17 percent.

"It's unrealistic to think that capping or cutting welfare benefits is going to dramatically reduce child- bearing," she said.

"It will do something. But if we are really serious about wanting to help these women and lower (unwed mothers') birthrates, we have to face the fact that real progress will come only if we increase opportunities for decent jobs.